I decided that the best way to spend this Sunday morning was to try to get free_cite, a citation parsing system, running on my server. Turns out this is easier said than done; the README provides no information on which versions of different software you need and also gives no advice on setting up the ruby environment.

In any case, here's the best way to do it. Turns out that you run into a massive headache if you try to use default Debian/Ubuntu package managers to configure Ruby (really? this shouldn't be hard to get right... but hey).

If you think you don't need the below detailed instructions, here's the info you do need: